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Housing Starts
About This Indicator
What Are Housing Starts?
How many new homes builders began, at an annual rate, from the Census Bureau. A 50-apartment building adds 50 homes.
Why Does It Matter?
Each start is a future home and months of work for carpenters and plumbers. Building runs on borrowed money, so rates bite here first: when mortgage rates passed 18% in 1981, starts fell to under half their late-1978 pace.
Can Politics Influence Them?
Mortgage rates matter most; they answer to the bond market and the Federal Reserve more than to any administration. Zoning is mostly local. Federal tax and lending rules work at the edges.
Key Idea
Too many starts and too few both leave marks. Starts above two million a year in 2005 rested on loose credit and left homes empty for years after the crash. In the 2010s they ran about a third below the prior fifty-year pace, and a home not built in one decade is still missing in the next.
Scored: Faster Growth Ranks Better
Source: Census Bureau. New Residential Construction, total starts (EITS resconst).
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